SPACES 1804 NORTH VAN NESS LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90028
A statement by Ferdinand Cheval from a article by Lawrence Durrell in Holiday
Magazine, ''In Praise of Fanatics" - Aug 1962
• (Durrell) It was written in simple schoolboy French which gave it an oracular
ring, both touching and authoritative. It was a sort of artistic credo, but it smelled
strangely of the direct vision of somebody like Blake. I read it slowly and with
growing admiration. It began:
• 'The son of peasant folk ^d therefore a peasant myself, I would like to live
and die in such a manner as to prove that even in my own order of life men of
genius and energy can be born, can exist. I've been a village postman for
twenty-nine years now. Work has been my only glory, honor my only well being.
Up to today, then, here is my strange history. Once, in a dream, I conceived and built
a palace, a castle in which there were grottoes I don't know how to explain
it but so ravishing, so picturesque, that for ten years the whole thing stayed
engraved in my memory. I could not get rid of it. Of course I took myself for a fool,
a maniac.
I was no mason, to start with, I had never touched a trowel. As for sculpture, I'd
never touched a chisel. As for architecture—leave it right out of the picture, I knew
nothing of it. I did dare not breathe a word about my dream to a soul for fear of
being laughed at in the village. To be truthful, I laughed at myself a bit.
Fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten this remote dream, a chance slip
of the foot jogged my memory. I tripped and fell over an object. It was a stone of a
form so bizarre that I slipped it into my pocket in order to study it at leisure. The
next day I went back to the same spot and found others, even more beautiful. The
stone was of a softish kind, deeply worked by river water and finally hardened by
time into something as tough as a pebble; but the shapes—they represent a sort of
sculpture so bizarre that I doubted if any man could imitate it. It was full of different
species of animal and human caricatures. I said to myself then, 'Well, if nature can
sculpt so easily, I am sure I can master masonry and architecture.' Here, then, was
my dream at last, 'To work,' I said to myself!"
Ferdinand Cheval - Le Facteur Cheval, (b.l836 - d.l924) creator of
le Palais Ideal, Hauterives, Drome, France
the Palais was built from
1879 -1912
10,000 Days
93,000 hours
33 years of hardship
if there is anyone more
obstinate than I, let him fall to work.